The resource-limited wireless network including sensor network, magnetic field area network, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) network, etc. has a broad application prospect in the fields such as military, environment monitoring, forest fire prevention, health care, logistics and the like, and plays an increasingly important role in those fields. But due to the wireless and broadcast characteristics in the communication, such network may be susceptible to attacks such as the messages being intercepted, tampered and forged and the entities being captured and copied. Thus it is necessary to introduce a low-overhead authentication and message secrecy mechanism, so as to ensure the validity of entities, and the confidentiality and integrity of communication messages in such network.
The current authentication methods are usually based on the crypto-operation, and require the entities in the network to preset corresponding cryptographic algorithms, otherwise the authentication protocol cannot be executed. In addition, even if the entities preset the cryptographic algorithms, the execution of the authentication protocol will also cause a calculation overhead to the entities in the network. For example, the authentication methods based on the symmetrical and unsymmetrical cryptographic algorithms both require the entities to perform an encryption and decryption operation, which increases the resource burden of the network entities, thus those methods are not suitable to be employed by the resource-limited network.